Plant breeding is one of the oldest recorded accomplishments of mankind. The ability to breed plants is an important mark in man's movement from nomadic life to organized society. Today's food crops are essentially the result of mankind's primitive plant breeding attempts.
The practice of plant breeding has progressed to a science. Plant breeding became a science when genetic principles gave predictablity to plant breeding. Plant breeding is basically man's conscious selection of genetic material instead of nature's selection of genetic material. Examples of the successes of plant breeding are the increased porductivity of field crops, development of insect resistant crops and disease resistant crops. The progression of the plant breeding science has been slowed by natural factors. These factors include: the length of time necessary for development of a plant to its sexual maturity, the length of time to pollen viability and the length of time to maturity of the pollen receptor. Presently plants, specifically maize, can only be pollinated when a plant is sexually mature, pollen is viable, and pollen receptors are available. Thus, if plants are cross pollinated such that the pollen of one plant is used to pollinate a second plant, the sexual maturity of both plants have to be coordinated to permit pollination to occur as the time period of pollen viability is limited in most crops. The method of increasing the efficiency and speed of plant breeding required the development of a system of storing pollen in a viable condition, a pollen bank. This eliminates the need to coordinate the timing of the sexual maturity of two plants and effectively eliminate one of the time factors in the plant breeding process. It eliminates plant breeding problems such as when pollen shed does not coincide with receptor maturity. Furthermore, the long term storage of viable pollen provides a unique ability to conserve and manipulate genetic resources. The ability to retrieve viable pollen, obtained from a group of individual plants stored for long periods of time provides great flexibility in plant breeding programs.
Methods for storage of viable pollen have been rested and some pollen can be stored. However, until the invention of the pollen dehydrating device, pollen from many row crops, especially maize, had not been successfully stored. Research on maize pollen storage had shown some limited success using air flotation when large quantities op pollen are stored. An air flotation method of drying prepared maize pollen for medium to long term storage. The system is somewhat limited as it does not allow the stored pollen to be readily used in a commercial breeding of hybrid field production program. The air flotation dries large quantities of pollen for storage. This stored pollen often has less than acceptable levels of viability when employed. This lack of viability made the use of stored pollen on a commercial basis somewhat unsatisfactory. Thus, only when the need for highly viable stored pollen was satisfied, could the remaining need to eliminate male plants in hybrid production fields also be satisfied. The present invention is a method of hybrid production without the male pollen producing plant.